VIDEO GAME: WALKING DEAD
The rhetoric in the video game Walking Dead Episode 1 was easy to observe. As a player you start off in a car with a police offer. If you don't know anything about the serie (just like me), you absolutely don't know what is happening. They game spoke for itself how to play, because I directly saw that I was having a conversation with he police officer and I as a player could steer the conversation in a way that I felt like was right. After a minute in the game, you already have a new task, namely fighting a zombie. Those two tasks, having a conversation and fighting, make the rhetoric in this game and the player gets his own responsibility for the outcome of every situation in the game. This responsibility grows as more you play and I got an emotional connection to the characters in the game. My gaming changed based on those emotional responsibilities towards my character and the other ones, just like Clementine.
The player choices got me really involved in the game and felt more like my character how more I played it. At one part in the game, my character had to make a choice between saving Duck (boy) or another character (man). As the character, I felt the responsibility to choose for the kid and therefore I did save Duck. Short after this decision I had to fight against the zombie and that got me more involved and I felt like I had to work hard to save the kid. Not much later I saw the consequence and I saw the other character be killed by the zombies. Another example is when you are further in the game. The game make you feel responsible for Clementine and this had a real effect on my player choices. When there was an option to talk with Clementine, I wanted to make sure she felt save to keep the trusting relationship with this character through the game. This is something I would do in real life too.
The interaction with the characters in the game really helps to get more emotionally attached to the characters in the game. The medium Video Game therefore helps to get deeper to the procedural rhetoric of the game that every choice will have consequences, but on the other hand you also can not influence every thing that will happen. The player choices in the game make you thing about the choices you make, because some of them can be really hard (choosing between two characters to save).
